


dreamstuff

by petalloso



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, strange happenings along the way, um! keith and lance are trapped in a dreamworld and must escape!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-10-04 10:28:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17302970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petalloso/pseuds/petalloso
Summary: “You are now susceptible to any and all physical manifestations of your human emotion, including guilt, shame, fear, anger, joy, despair, grief, love, arousal-”“Okay, okay,” Lance interrupts. “I think we get it.”





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> ik u didn't ask for this but i just wanna vomit a life update jfdlasjfjds (skip this next graph for the mort relevant/important part) 
> 
> i got straight a's this semester for the first time since highschool (I GOT AN A- IN ORGO fdjklasf Im SOOo grateful ooF), my first ever bf and i broke up after 8 months and it was a Sad time but in the end it was ok like i understand it was so much better for us in the end it was just dang sad and i hurted at the time. hmmm i went skydiving, got into a hella cool studyabroad program, took a fic writing class and actually finished an o.k. short story. my family fought a lot and made up a lot, brother moved out then back in then out again. made some cool friends lost a few friends. 
> 
> ANYWAY this all goes to say that i started this story literally i think oct 2017 and stopped writing it after like 2k words and then revived it 2 weeks ago. i havent seen s8 or s9 (is that the right s# idk? the last two seasons those havent seen em and probably wont ever if im being honest), and bc this was started before those even came out i'm guessing that it doesnt really work canonically now (if it ever really did bc what even is canon whomst knows dont ask me). so yeah pls forgive me for literally stealing the characters and nothing else from the show; hopefully its not too bothersome or awkward or weird. just know that i havent seen the last parts of the show and keep in mind while reading if something like,,,;; doesnt make any freaking sense considering canon 
> 
> but yeah! i guess also bc this took me so long to write i forgot a lot of my original ideas, lost a little inspiration in some parts and such, but in the end i loved writing it (even tho it was loads stressful), so i hope yall like reading it, too, or at least find it Tolerable. hehehehr ethat'd be cool. anyway thanks for clicking and thanks even more for reading. love ya
> 
> TRIGGER WARNINGS; for vague descriptions of anxiety and other mental/emotional strife, mentions of suicide towards the end, etc. hmu @petalloso.tumblr.com or @pininqkeith.tumblr.com if you have any q's i would be happy to answer those or if u just wanna chat also down 
> 
> thx <3
> 
> (a final note: i am aware the dreamworld rulebook is inconsistent and this is b/c i am a lazy planner and just wrote what came to mind regardless of technicalities. also, some things are not explained /also a product of my inarticulate nature and general laziness/ so feel free to interpret as u so pls! ALSO im rlly freaking bad at imagery and world-building and such so pls forgive me as a stumble through that; hopefully it is not too awkward. AND A FINAL ALSO, i know i could've done a lot a lot more with this concept but my sheer lack of imagination, and my inability to translate the images in my head into adequate words b/c words are supremely hard, has stifled me. the nice thing about that is that you guys get to fill in the gaps and imagine things of your own, ya know. i leave the imagery up to you and your cool, probably largely more imaginative minds xoxoxo gossip squirrel)
> 
> p.p.p.p.p.s.
> 
> ily

It was supposed to be a reconnaissance mission. They were to be in and then out, quick as a kid stealing a spoonful of paella before dinner time. In no circumstances were they to be caught or to make contact with the native alien species.

They’d failed on both accounts.

“Just pull harder,” Keith whispers, or tries to. He’s probably too distraught to notice how loud he’s being.

“Your wrists look so delicate though.”

“You can’t even see them,” Keith says, exasperation evident. He is right, of course. They are sitting back to back, stuffed in a small wooden cage with their hands tied tightly behind their backs. They’ve also been stripped of their paladin armor, leaving them only in the black shirts and leggings that are typically worn underneath. Lance is freezing. He’s surprised he isn’t shaking.

“Still,” he says. “I feel like I’m hurting you.”

“You aren’t, trust me. Pull harder.”

Lance does so, even though he’s sure the rope is rubbing painfully into Keith’s skin and it makes him feel kind of horrible. Except barely a moment later two alien guards appear by the entrance of their little jail, opening its door and promptly pulling them out, Keith first, and then Lance, who has to focus not to fall flat on his face.

“Look,” Lance says to the one who is grabbing at an uncooperative Keith. “We’re the paladins of Voltron. We’re not here to harm you, so could you maybe please just let us go?”

The guard says nothing. This, Lance thinks, is not entirely surprising. He probably cannot understand them without their helmets to conveniently translate.

Keith is still trying to wiggle out from his grip, but the guard is strong and relentless, and Keith gets absolutely nowhere. Lance calls out his name, his voice more distressed than he’d hoped, and gives him a pointed look he hopes will communicate to him to stop struggling. It would only make it worse. And if they hurt him.

If they hurt him Lance would probably stop breathing altogether. Dramatic, he knows, but given his newfound affections towards the guy, not all that far off base.

The message gets across. Keith purses his lips a little, clearly not liking it, but he allows the guard to hold his arms behind his back without a struggle. Lance can physically feel his heart rate slowing. It probably shouldn’t be, given the situation as a whole, but he is less terrified knowing Keith is out of any immediate harm by forceful restraint.

“So,” Lance says to the guard who’s holding him. “What’s next? We going somewhere special?”

The guard grunts, which is a good sign he might understand the question, although Lance isn’t sure if it’s meant as an affirmative or not.

He passes the time it takes to be led to their next destination contemplating this, and also keeping an eye on Keith. He’s wiggling a little, clearly unhappy about surrendering and probably itching for a fight, but avoiding any kind of movement that might warrant one of those blasters the guards are carrying to the face.

To be perfectly honest Lance finds the planet kind of beautiful. The sky is a pallet of cool colors, blues and purples mixed messily like acrylics, and the air is pleasantly cool. It almost reminds him of the beach in his hometown, sans the water. And the sand. And everything except the sky and the weather, really. Still.

Maybe he’s just grasping at any resemblance of comfort, he thinks. His mind was bombarding him left and right with thoughts he couldn’t keep up with or really do much about. Like his family. Keith’s safety. The safety of the universe-- just a little less than Keith’s safety.

They soon enter a small cave. Lance shivers as the temperature drops dramatically. It’s entirely dark inside, and the rocks glisten as though wet. At one point he can’t make out anything; only when he thinks he’s about to go crazy from the darkness does he see a source of bluish light in the distance.

They are guided to walk until they reach the source. The ceiling is so low Lance wonders if he’s claustrophobic and just hadn't known it. Both he and Keith are oriented towards the center of the small space, and then released by the guards, who join the others that circle them. In the very front of the space are two of what resemble tiki torches, seemingly floating above the ground and their flames a bright and striking blue. In the center of these stands the alpha alien.

Or, maybe not alpha. That was not the word Lance would use, but he doesn’t know how to describe them. Perhaps the leader. The pope? The chief alien. Yes. They seemed to have the aerial quality of a chief.  

“Welcome,” the chief alien says. They’ve got six black eyes and an ambiguous gender, and are dressed in a glorious t-shirt-esque robe. They look wise and all-knowing, as such aliens typically do. Where their translucent skin is not donned in robe, it allows them a lovely view of their internal organs. He never paid enough attention in high school biology, but he's sure humans don't have so many. Their skin also reflects the blue of the flames beautifully. Lance is sort of appalled, sort of entranced, and just a little terrified.  

Well, he supposes after a moment's pause, at least now they know these aliens speak English. Odd, he thinks, how conveniently coincidental that is.

“Uh, thanks,” he says. Keith says nothing, per usual. He is likely steaming in bloodthirsty anger at having not been allowed a fight.

“I hear rumors of your claims,” the chief alien says. Their voice is sort of warbly, like they are speaking through a translator. But Lance can’t spot anything of the sort nearby.

“Claims?” Lance asks.

“Yes. That you are the paladins of Voltron.”

“Oh,” Lance says. “Those aren’t claims, my dude. We really are.”

“Hm,” the chief alien says. “So you say. Unfortunately, we have nothing to substantiate this. We only know that you have invaded our home and sought information that was not yours to have. This seems contrary to who you say you are.”

“Look,” Keith pipes up, clearly annoyed and itching to provoke something. “Believe us or not, we haven’t harmed you in any way. We came here for information, we got it, and now we’re going.”

_ Keith,  _ Lance thinks, exacerbated but not surprised. This is why Allura doesn’t let you anywhere near the diplomatic side of saving the universe. We'd probably be dead already. 

“You are not going anywhere,” the chief alien says, calmly and simply. Their eyes are assessing and curious. They look at Keith as though they can glean something largely important from just looking. After a moment, they nod as if he makes absolute sense. Keith doesn’t seem to appreciate that notion, given the expression on his face.

“If you are indeed the paladins of Voltron," the chief aliens says. "It will be necessary to prove this.”

“How can we do that?” Lance asks before Keith can interrupt again. The chief alien turns towards him. Their eyes blink slowly, black and pupil-less. They smile, not unkindly but it still gives Lance shivers. They have so many freaking teeth. He wonders if they've got dentists on this planet. 

“A test,” the chief says, and suddenly the two guards from before are beside them once again, pushing them down to the floor by the shoulders, so their knees press uncomfortably into the rocks. Keith protests but Lance says his name again, and he quiets. The alien chief seems to find this exchange interesting, as evident from their face, but says nothing.

“Don’t harm us,” Lance says. He’s trying for calm and collected. It comes out more desperate and panicked. Right on the mark. 

“We will not,” the chief alien assures him. “Well, not in this world, at least.”

“What?” Keith says for the both of them.

“Let me explain,” the chief says, their webbed hands up to placate their seeming impatience. “But first, please administer the liquid.”

Lance cries out just as Keith does. They are struck with something sharp like a needle in the back of the neck. Something enters his body, he knows, because instantly he is warm everywhere and light-headed. It would be kind of nice, if it wasn't involuntarily injected. Relaxing. He needs a nap. 

“What is this?” He asks.

“Dreamstuff,” the chief alien says. Maybe the actual name was lost in translation. It sounded like some fancy schmancy pillow spray his Nana would buy from the shop downtown that sold magic crystals and tarot cards.

“Okay,” he responds through the haze in his head. “That clears it up.”

“Soon your bodies will sleep,” the chief says. “You will be suspended inside your dreams indefinitely, until you can prove that you are able to control and escape them. Your success in doing so will prove to us who you are. Your failure will prove you are either lying or, if not, that you are not fit to be the paladins of Voltron.”

“Um…” He should probably say something in protest, but he’s mostly caught on the part about being suspended in a dream. Which also sounded like something his Nana would spend all dinner and coffee afterwards talking about. That's why you need to keep these in your pocket and your bag and underneath your pillow when you sleep, mijo. So you will not get trapped in your dreams. Maybe he ought to have listened to her. 

“You are now susceptible to any and all physical manifestations of your human emotion, including guilt, shame, fear, anger, joy, grief, love, arousal-”

“Okay, okay,” Lance interrupts, voice sloppy like he's drunk. “I think we get it.”

The alien chief ignores him. “If you are consumed, burned, tortured, drowned or otherwise killed by these manifestations, you will fail to awaken back into this world.”

“Sounds fun,” Keith mumbles. Lance wonders if he imagines the slight lull to his voice, and when he looks to Keith, if the droop of his eyelids is from exhaustion or from whatever they’ve been injected with. The dreamstuff, as they say.

He’ll get his answer soon enough, he supposes.

“Yes,” the alien confirms. “It will be fun.”

Lance doesn't think he knows the meaning of the word. He feels groggy like after a long day spent in the sun. He craves his mom’s sopes, his childhood bed, and something else he can’t pinpoint.

“Are you ready?” A guard asks, which seems uncharacteristically considerate of him. Lance wants to pat him on the back and give him a hug. 

“I guess so,” he responds. He thinks he tries to shrug his shoulders, but they are weighed down by gravity. He wonders what the units for gravity are. A thousand million gravities are weighing on his whole body. It’s so unbelievably heavy.

The last thing he hears before he blacks out is the chief before them, their hands clasped in front of them, chin high and six or eight or however many eyes they have peering curiously at them, like they too wonder what might be in store.  

“Then you shall begin.”

  
  


 

 

His eyes hurt. He can’t open them quite yet, but he knows it's light out by the red spiderwebs that spread across the inside of his eyelids. Someone groans beside him, the voice as familiar to him as his own. He reaches out a hand and it hits Keith, who grunts and swats him away. He opens his eyes.

“Jesus,” he says. “My head kills.”

“I think I have a concussion,” Keith says. He holds his head in two hands, cradling it, bends his neck and brings his knees to his chest, curled up like a little rollie pollie. He looks like he’s in more pain than Lance.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Keith says, softly like the sound of his own voice hurts him. “Just give me a ‘sec.”

Lance says nothing. He lets Keith gather himself and takes the time to assess their surroundings. It only takes him a moment to recognize where they are, and it almost sends him into a panic. He breathes through it, like he always does.

It’s his home. They are laying on the front lawn, just next to the steps that lead to the front door of the house he grew up in. The tree they used to climb as kids is barren even though the sun shines harshly down on them so it must be the summertime, and its swing sways gently like someone had just heard their mother’s calls and gone inside for dinner. A swell of simultaneous warmth and panic balloons inside him.

“Hey,” Keith is saying. “What’s wrong?”

Lance shakes his head. He knows how awful he must sound, and how awfully strange it must be for him to be laughing right now, but he can’t help it.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just… this is where I live.”

“What?” Keith sounds confused, too.

“Like on Earth. This is my house.”

“Why are we here?”

“I don’t know. They must have picked it from by brain somehow.”

“Are you gonna be okay?”

Keith’s obviously concerned, which makes Lance feel warm and also guilty. His concern is also not entirely misplaced, given that Lance is feeling not great being in a strange replicate of his childhood home, the one he’d abandoned. The one he’d no idea if he would ever get back to.  

There’s a reason they chose this, though. It’s  _ supposed  _ to get to him, so the best course of action was to not let it.

“Yeah,” he says to Keith. “I’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” Keith says simply, because for some reason he’s been trusting Lance more so than ever. It’s nice. Things have been different between them lately. It’s nice.

“I’m gonna check inside.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. Anything that could get us out of this stupid dream world.” He climbs the steps of the front porch, wonders if there is still a squeak on the third step, and if when his foot places and there is, if it’s only because he thought about it. 

Keith follows behind. Lance takes comfort in the knowledge that he isn’t alone, that this isn’t real, and that Keith’s presence is here to reassure him of that. Not like he’s ever daydreamed about bringing him home to meet his family.

He turns the knob and steps inside.

It feels so real, is the thing. It is exactly his home, just an odd and emptier version of it. He focuses on the warmth and silence of Keith standing beside him, not on the odd chill of the air around them, and goes forward down the hall.

Everything is exactly as he remembers. All the picture frames hanging lopsided on the walls, framing photographs of Lance and his family at the beach, on Thanksgiving, opening Christmas presents, during a picnic, Veronica’s high school graduation. When he steps into the kitchen it is as though his mother just stepped out, leaving the dishes still dripping and the scent of sopa de albondigas in the air. It makes his stomach rumble. He wonders if there are any leftovers in the fridge, but given the appetites of his siblings, he doubts it.

“Lance,” Keith says. “Are you sure there’s anything here?”

“No.” If he was being entirely honest. This was mostly self indulgent and stupid. “Probably not.” Still, he makes his way upstairs.

“I just wanna check one thing,” he says to Keith, who nods in acceptance and follows.

It’s all the same still, the halls, the piles of laundry at the sides, his brother’s refusal to vacuum. Even the dent in the wall by his bedroom door is the same, from when he and Marco thought it would be a good idea to play tennis indoors. It’s all the same until he opens the door to his room.

This is what he was so afraid of. It’s what he dreams about on the worst nights. All his things, packed away in boxes stacked atop each other, ready to be taken away. The walls are bare, pictures taken down and leaving only holes of thumbtacks. The window is open to the backyard garden, but the scent of mint and tomatoes is absent.

“Lance,” Keith is saying. He hasn’t stepped inside the room. Lance looks to him and uses his voice as an anchor.

“This isn’t real,” he says. “Your head is messing with you. It’s making this seem real because you’re afraid of it.”

Of course he’s right. His words ease the pit of swarming butterflies in his stomach. The boxes do not disappear, but he imagines when he opens them they will be empty.

“Yeah,” he says. “We should go.”

“Okay,” Keith says, and follows Lance down the stairs and out the front door.

Lance imagines the house collapsing behind him, and though he’s too afraid to turn around and watch it happen himself, he almost hears the raucous sound of its falling. It was not his real home, not what he would come back to. And he  _ would _ come back to it.

But he sees it too soon, or maybe not soon enough. It wasn’t there before, because he’s sure he would have noticed it. There is a large stone that sits sticking out from the ground, right beside the tree whose branches he would swing from as a child.

He steps closer to read the engraved words and his heart lurches into his throat. It’s not very funny, but again there is a bubble of laughter expanding inside of him. The butterflies are a frenzy, ripping his stomach to shreds.

_ Leandro Alexis Mcclain _

_ July 28, 1999 - December 12, 2016 _

“It’s not real,” he says to himself. “I’m making this up. It’s not real.”

But it looks so real. He couldn’t dream how real this was. The stone is perfectly aged. There are dried baby’s breath laying in front of it. His mother’s favorite. He doesn’t remember those being there just a second ago.  

“Lance,” Keith says. From his voice he is just as shocked at the sight. His words waver slightly, like he can’t stand to look. “Lance,” he says again.

“Keith,” he replies, and reaches for him. Something stops him mid-way.  

It’s a butterfly. It’s wings are the darkest black and bigger than any he’s seen before. It perches at the tip of his index finger, peers at him with beady black eyes. It looks cruel. Lance’s stomach swarms.

Suddenly there is another. Like when he blinked it thought to take that span of a second to become existent. Lance stares at them perched so delicately on his finger. He closes his eyes and hopes that when he opens them they will vanish, but instead he feels them multiply in seconds, their legs crawling all over his arm, all over his body. They swarm him with their dark bodies, crawling beneath his shirt, beneath his skin and fluttering their wings like they want to cut him to shreds. Their wings are razor blades. They are cutting him to shreds. It is the feeling in his stomach but everywhere. He wants to scream. 

“Lance,” Keith says, calm except for the slightest tremble in his voice. Lance had forgotten he had been reaching for him. Somehow Keith has gotten ahold of his hand through the mess of butterflies, and has shoved himself into the swarm.

When Lance opens his eyes he can’t see him. All he can see is the black of their wings all around him, a thousand cruel, beady eyes staring as they try to consume him. He feels them inside of him, crawling inside of his throat and behind his eyes and in his ribcage, trying to escape the confines of his stomach but destroying him in the process. He wants to retch them out and stomp them to black paste.

But Keith says his name again. He focuses on that. On the warmth of Keith’s hand squeezing his own. He always runs cold but still it is so different from the coldness of their flapping wings around him.

“This isn’t real,” he says again. He is not dead. His family knows that. They would not bury him without a body. They wouldn’t stop waiting for him to come home.

And that isn’t his real home. These butterflies are not cruel. They are kind. They are when he rides the dragon boat at the amusement park, the one that swings a hundred feet in the air and then back down again. They are when Keith smiles at him, his cheeks a beautiful shade of light, pink roses. They are when Shiro pats him so hard on the back he almost topples over, congratulating him on the mission. They are when Hunk introduces Lance as his best friend. 

They are monarchs, pushed astray by the summer gusts of wind but flying back towards their path each time.  

The swarm settles. Lance watches as their colors melt, from black to the bright orange that he remembers so clearly from the meadow close to home, the one he would nap in on hot summer days. They flutter away, leaving him only with his hand in Keith’s, who is looking at him in that way that always makes the butterflies in his stomach flutter, but happily.

  
  


 

 

“I wonder if we need to eat.”

He doesn't exactly have an appetite, on account of hacking up some gooey, dead butterflies earlier, and hearing Keith say "yummy" as they both looked down at it, like that was the appropriate response or thing to say. But his stomach grumbles. It could be hunger. Or it could be anxiety. Or it could be irritable bowel. All probable possibilities. 

“Probably not,” Keith says. “I’m assuming we function like we do in regular dreams, so time moves slower than when we’re awake. Hypothetically you probably could, but you don’t  _ need  _ to.”

“I wonder if I could conjure up lasagna with my mind.”

“Maybe lemonade, too.”

“Gotcha.”

Lance thinks long and hard about a beautiful steaming plate of fresh lasagna, and a nice chilly pitcher of lemonade. Neither is kind enough to manifest itself. Which is dumb. The rules of this stupid dream world are dumb. 

“Yeah,” Keith says. “What’s the point of manifesting emotions if I can’t manifest food. Is hunger an emotion, do you think?”

Lance hums in thought. “Nah. It’s more a physical than an emotional bodily phenomenon. I guess desire could be. I desire some lasagna right now.”

Keith sighs. “Me, too.”

They are laying on the ground of an empty expanse. The ground beneath them began as pink sand, but it doesn’t feel like that anymore, more like a mattress with rusty springs, but also like floating in a ball pit at the local mall, but also none of those things, and all of those things. 

They are passing the time by staring at the sky, which is like a giant canvas and keeps changing colors. It paints itself in front of them with an invisible hand, one moment in watercolor, the next in oils, and the next in some medium he doesn’t recognize. His favorite is when it starts crosshatching in grey. He sees faces and shapes take form in it, but they disappear as soon as he points them out to Keith. Keith points out what he sees to Lance, but Lance can’t see that either.

He’s getting kind of lazy. He feels sleepy, and wonders if they can sleep in this world, or if it’d trigger some kind of inception phenomenon and make it so they can’t wake up at all. He doesn’t want to risk it, so he elbows Keith in the ribs.

“Ow,” Keith grunts. “Why?”  

“Don’t fall asleep.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“What if you don’t wake up?”

“I’m not going to fall asleep, Lance.”

“Well we should do something to make sure of that.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Twenty questions.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Because I just made it up. I ask you a question, and you have to answer truthfully. And then you ask me one. Until we’ve reached twenty questions. Then we know way more about each other than we had before.”

“I already know you,” Keith says, so sure in his voice it kind of hurts Lance’s heart.

“It’s just to pass the time.”

“Okay,” Keith agrees. “I go first. Favorite smell.”

“Mom’s cooking. Favorite place?”

Keith hums, like he has to think about it first. “The castle.”

“Really? Why?”

“Isn’t it my turn?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He makes a mental note on his mental notepad to pry later.

“Biggest regret.”

“Jesus,” Lance says. “Getting to the deep stuff already?”

Keith laughs. “It doesn’t have to be deep.”

“Fine, I’ll answer if you tell me why it’s the castle.” Those weren’t technically the rules of the game, but it was made-up anyway, and he was hoping Keith wouldn’t care enough to point it out. 

“Okay,” he agrees, maybe too easily. 

“I wish I’d called my mom back.,” Lance says. “That day we followed Pidge up to the roof, and followed you to save Shiro.”

“Oh,” Keith says. “What would you have told her?”

It’s not technically his turn, but Lance doesn’t mind answering. He sort of wants to, actually. It might help him to breathe away whatever is stuck circulating in his lungs, making his chest so constantly achy. 

“I don’t know for sure,” he says honestly. “That I love her. That I miss her. The things we never think we won’t get the chance to again.”

“You’ll get the chance,” Keith says, almost like a promise, even though it’s not on him to keep it. Lance believes him even though he can’t know that for certain. A butterfly lands at the tip of his foot. He shakes his toes but it stays perched there, stubborn and still except for the slow opening and closing of its wings.

“Yeah,” he says, in lieu of thank you. “So? Why the castle?”

Keith takes a moment to think about his answer. 

“Honestly at first I hated us all living so close together,” he says eventually. “But the more I got used to it, the more I started feeling like, I dunno, I couldn’t go back to my life in the desert.”

“The castle is home,” Lance says, which makes absolute sense. But it was more than the castle, too. He knows that. 

“Yeah,” Keith says.

The sky above them paints itself a dark purple. It happens to fast, like buckets of paint spilled over a canvas. It rumbles, and Lance sees a flash of something bright, like lighting but oddly colored, darker and larger and more terrifying.

“Is that you?”

“I think so,” Keith says softly, and when Lance looks back towards him his eyes are squeezed tightly shut, his hands clenched into fists. He’s not angry, because Lance has seen Keith truly angry and it was quieter than this. This was more like grief.  

Was purple the color of grief? He didn’t know. 

“I’m sorry,” Keith says. “I’m thinking about things I shouldn’t.”

Lance didn’t think that was the problem according to his very limited experience in this very stupid dreamworld. Keith shouldn’t have to stop thinking about the things that made him feel so strongly, just to think of them differently, and to change the way they were important to him.

“What are you thinking of?”

“My dad,” he says. “My mom.” A burst of lightning strikes the floor some twenty feet away from them, leaving the hairs on Lance’s neck and arms raised and the area around it scorched black. A ball of lightning forms, too. The sound of it reminds him of cicadas in the summer except a thousand times louder. It begins to circle them. 

“Don’t stop,” Lance says. Not to the quickly approaching yarn-ball of lightning, which he thinks could probably kill them and would love for it to stop, but to Keith. 

“What?” Keith opens his eyes but only to glare at him. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You just have to think differently.”

“How differently?”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of an abstract idea. Just change the feeling. Instead of grief, make it like, nostalgia or something.”

“Nostalgia.” Keith sounds like he hates the word, or otherwise doesn’t know what it means. But he closes his eyes in concentration, and just a moment later the sky above them fades to lavender. The lightning subsides, its rumbles quieting to nothing. The lighting that circles them dissipates, leaving the ground tar-like and black. He can still hear its buzzing in his ears. 

He is about to congratulate Keith on an emotion accomplished, but something distracts him from ever getting those particular words out. 

“Dude,” he says. “Your hands.” He has the urge to reach out and hold them, for some absurd and masochistic reason, so he does, and immediately pulls away with a yelp. 

“Sorry,” Keith says, bringing his hands up to his face and spreading his fingers. Something like electricity pulses in his veins, from his elbows and down his forearms to the tips of his fingers, bright even through the layers of skin. Lightning sparks and crackles in front of him, illuminating his face in a purplish glow. 

“You’re sparkling,” Lance says.

“It feels kinda weird.”

“Like going down a slide and getting shocked by the static?”

Keith lets his hands fall to his sides, arms unlit and normal once again. “That’s never happened to me.”

“Damn,” Lance says, feeling a pang of sadness that doesn’t belong entirely to him. “You missed out.”

“On being shocked by a slide?”

“Yeah. I thought it was a universal experience.”

“I don’t think anything’s universal.”

“Sure something is.”

“Like what?”

“Like, I don’t know, running your hands under warm water after playing in the snow, that burning feeling.”

Keith doesn’t look convinced, which means it’s another thing he hasn’t experienced, which makes Lance sad to think. Keith has just opened his mouth to retort when Lance spots something over his shoulder. He’s actually surprised he hadn’t seen it earlier, with how obviously large and conspicuous it is. 

“What the hell is that?” He says. Keith turns around to look at where he’s pointing, and the two of them stare together at what seems to be an enlarging and approaching loom of darkness. It must be miles away, but gargantuan and disturbingly menacing, and the longer Lance looks at it the more creeped out he feels. It feels alive and continuously growing as it travels towards them.  

“I don’t know,” Keith says, panic evident in his voice but only because Lance is practiced at detecting it. “But I think we should run.”

He reaches out to grasp onto the hem of Lance’s shirt as though in comfort, his own or Lance’s he’s not sure. Lance doesn’t shake him off. Instead he shifts to grab at Keith’s forearm, firm but gentle at the same time.

“Great idea,” he says. Keith only nods at him, eyes still tracking the giant and approaching presence. He wiggles his arm so Lance will let go, but only to grab at Lance’s hand with his own and intertwine their fingers.

Lance decides not to read much into it, even though his heart is doing backflips at the touch. Given their current situation, his heart could be a newfound gymnast for a multitude of reasons. They were alone in a confusing dreamworld with no clear path to escape. It was likely just for familiarity and comfort.

And it did help. As the two of them pried their eyes away from the presence, it became easier to ignore the dark and ominous feeling that seeped into their skin, and instead focus on the feeling of warm skin on skin, matching each other’s pace as they headed away from whatever was following them and towards an empty unknown expanse.

  
  


 

 

Odd objects keep popping up from the ground. They’re moving too fast to stop and observe, but Lance thinks a lot of them are alive. Like plants of the sort that didn’t exist in the true world, or at least, not on Earth.

Lance remembers reading once that the human brain couldn’t dream what it hadn’t seen before, that all the bystanders in a dream were people you had already seen on the street you hadn’t realized you’d memorized, and that worlds in dreams were only built from the bits and pieces of what you already saw and knew.  

He wonders if that’s true in this world. Maybe the worst things he’d imagined would be the worst that could manifest themselves here. It wasn’t much comfort, but it at least eliminated what was beyond his scope of imagination.

His mother always said he had an active one.

“I think this is mostly you,” Keith says. He’s a few paces in front of Lance, having released his hand a while back. It’d left his whole body just a little colder. But he could deal. 

“I don’t think so, man. I don’t recognize any of this.”

“Well, I don’t either.”

Lance hums in answer and glances upwards as though the sky can give him some semblance of understanding. He startles.

“The fuck?”

“What?” Keith asks.

“The sky,” Lance says, pointing upwards. “It’s all newspaper.”

Keith looks up. “That’s really unsettling,” he says.  

“I’m not doing that. Are you?”

“How should I know?”

“I don’t know, dude.”

“Maybe it’s random. Look, it’s changing again.”

Lance watches as the newspapers fold in on themselves, flapping like open mouths for a second until he realizes that’s exactly what they are, or what they have become. Giant mouths.

They’re screaming, too. More annoyingly than terrifyingly, but the sound is so loud Lance thinks his ears will bleed hearing it. He lifts his hands to cover them, feels a wetness that could be blood, and realizes that maybe his previous thoughts have conjured up exactly that. He wills the feeling away. It kind of works, but the screaming still rings in his ears.

He looks over to Keith, whose nose is scrunched up and whose hands are up to his ears. Keith meets his gaze and mouths something. His lips look oddly similar to those overhead. Maybe it’s a coincidence. All mouths looked mostly the same. It’s just that Lance has spent an unreasonable and not creepy amount of time staring at Keith’s mouth. So maybe it’s not a coincidence. Fuck. 

“What?!” Lance says. He can’t hear himself over the screaming. 

_ IS THIS YOUR DOING,  _ Keith mouths.

_ NO,  _ Lance mouths back, even though it very well could be. Although if this was supposed to be a manifestation of something then he had no idea where to even begin guessing of what. 

Keith purses his lips, clearly not convinced. His expression reminds Lance, rather untimely, of how he looks when he spars. Definitely untimely. As is the way his stomach flutters a little at the reminder. 

Also untimely is the sky’s reaction. Lance watches as the mouths close, purse their lips, and then blink open into a thousand gargantuan eyes staring expectantly and unblinkingly at them. 

Keith releases his hands from the sides of his head.

“What even…” he says, confusion evident.

This is definitely him, even though he isn’t sure he wants to confess that. Their collective stares emit exactly the kind of scrutinous, suspiciously unfriendly curiosity Lance had grown up fearing.

It reminds him of the feeling he’d had after sneaking a glance at the boys at the beach, their tanned skin and sunlit faces. Also of the way his hands shook the first time he kissed a girl, and more so the first time he kissed a boy four years later.

It reminds him of being watched and always so careful to not say something he shouldn’t or do something he can’t.

But he remembers his advice. Think differently. Change the feeling into something better. Easier said than done, probably, and he kind of regrets being a sort of dick about it towards Keith earlier.

So he focuses hard. He thinks of a tiny therapist version of himself on his shoulder, with spectacles and a blue collared shirt.

_ Keith watches you,  _ tiny therapist Lance says.  _ Think about that. _

It’s true. He knows he does and is doing so now. His gaze is gentler than those above. Curious. Worried. He blinks like a cat.

His mother watches him. She watches that he eats enough, because as a child he was always too restless to finish his dinner. She watches for his moods, which for several years were erratic and unpredictable. She’s probably watching for him now, every day for the turn of their front door knob and the reappearance of her missing son.

_ Well,  _ therapist Lance says, just as the eyes grow larger and nearer to them, and form giant droplets of tears in their corners,  _ not very helpful, now is it. _

Right, Lance thinks. He was doing well until that last addition. He steers himself towards something else, something that will help his own eyes and those overhead to blink the tears away.

It takes too long though.

“Lance,” Keith says, shielding his head and hissing as the droplets land onto his hands, sizzling as they meet his skin. 

Lance feels it, too. It burns badly, a stinging sensation that reminds him of the time he’d went for a swim with the jellyfish, stupidly thinking he could dodge them, and his brother had insisted he must pee on him afterwards.

Irrelevant. The eyes blink all at once and reopen with tentacles hanging from their lids like eyelashes, but heavier and translucent. And dripping acidic rain. Lovely. 

“We need shelter,” Lance says.

“Where is shelter exactly?” Keith says. 

Lance has no idea. He wills his brain to forget about jellyfish. About being watched.

_ You watch, too,  _ therapist Lance says. Lance had forgotten about therapist Lance.

He watches, too. That counted. He watches Keith’s back during a fight. To be sure he’s safe. To make sure he’s safe. He watches for a target each time he pulled the trigger, and afterwards to be certain he’d hit it. 

He watches for his teams’ moods and needs and wants.

Another droplet falls onto his forearm, burning into his skin and leaving a reddened mark. He gasps at the pain.

He watches for when they need help but won’t ask for it, because they’re all too stubborn to reach out. He watches for when the best time would be to crack a joke, and watches for when he shouldn’t. He liked to think he was good at reading people. His mother always said he had a perceptiveness to him unlike any other person she’d ever known.

He watches Keith.

_ You’ve said that already,  _ therapist Lance says. He can almost feel tiny footsteps on his shoulder, a tiny hand cupping his ear to whisper into it. He wonders if Keith sees a little Lance perched there, and why he hasn’t said anything.

Yeah, he’s said it already. But it was only now he truly understood how much. And the significance of that. The recognition terrifies him, but in retrospect he knew it all along. It was just taking its sweet, sweet time to articulate itself. 

He watched Keith while he sparred, the sweat on his brow and upper lip, the peek of his tummy when he lifted his shirt to wipe it away. He watched the fluid movements of his body with each jump and dodge and strike, how easy it seemed for him but then afterwards, how his chest heaved like he couldn’t catch his breath, like the beginnings of an anxiety attack, how desperate he must feel sometimes, and how much strength it must take to fight like that. 

He watched him while he watched the stars, the way their light looked shining on his cheeks and reflecting in his eyes. He watched him from across the sofa in the break room, how he would massage one arm with the opposite hand like it hurt, and Lance knew, because he’d watched for how long and how hard he’d been training, that it did.

A single drop lands on him, stings for a moment and then evaporates. He glances up and away from Keith, and watches as midair the falling droplets turn to bubbles and float down towards them, landing gently as flower petals.  

  
  


 

 

They continue walking for what seems like eternity, but he supposes time passes slower in dreams, so it’s probably not been too long at all. There’s an almost unbearable itch on his arms. He goes to scratch it but that just makes it worse. It feels almost like a mosquito bite, but everywhere and achy. 

He lifts a sleeve to assess the possible damage and sees that something is surfacing from beneath his skin. He almost screams, but manages to swallow the sound before it escapes his throat.

It is a single thorny vine. He can feel its thorns poking sharply at the insides of his arm. He peers more closely as another vine begins to grow beneath his skin, and then pushes its way through the surface. He bleeds. It fucking hurts.

“Shit,” he mumbles. His voice sounds croaky and in pain, and it catches Keith’s attention. 

“What’s wrong?”

Lance has quick reflexes, though. He doesn’t know what prompts him to hide this, but he pulls his sleeve down to hide the vines that are growing so quickly they now wrap themselves around both his forearms, thorns digging into his skin from inside and out. 

“Nothing,” he says, and thanks the being or beings in the sky that his voice doesn’t give away his pain for a second time.

“Just shit?”

“I think this place warrants just shit.”

Keith doesn’t slow in his walking. He makes up for his lack of height with greater strides, in such a way that Lance has to actively pay mind to keeping up with him. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “I guess it’s not that bad after a while.”

“That’s because you have remarkable control over your emotions.”

Keith laughs. “Not really. Not at all, actually.”

“Yeah, never mind. I don’t even know why I said that.”

“Hey,” Keith says, like he’s just starting a conversation even though they’re already in one. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, dude. I’m great.” 

“Your voice is kind of overcompensating, which makes me think you’re the opposite.”

“Damn, since when did you get so perceptive?”

Keith quirks an eyebrow at him. “I always paid attention to you, Lance.”

And that there. Exactly that, is what gets to him, and makes him so frustrated he’s surprised something doesn’t manifest itself to give his frustration away-- Keith has no idea the effect he has on people. On him.

“Why do you do that?” He asks. He doesn’t mean to sound so harsh. It just comes out that way. Keith doesn’t seem to care or even notice.

“Do what?”

“Say stuff like that. Like it doesn’t mean anything.”

“It does mean something. Obviously. That’s why I said it.”

“Well, be more careful. You have this thing.”

“Thing?”

“Yeah. This effect on people.”

“I think you’re just sensitive.”

Lance laughs, feeling his frustration fall away, easily as it always does with Keith nowadays. “Fuck you,” he says. “I’m not sensitive.”

Keith smiles. “It’s not a bad thing. You’re just, like, emotionally driven.”

“Says you.”

“Yeah? So we have that in common, I guess.”

It scares him how true that is. 

Keith’s hands still occasionally spark lightning, both of his entire forearms lighting up bright purple each time. Lance wonders if it only happens when Keith thinks about something bad. Or only when he’s reminded of something he doesn’t want to remember. Or if it’s just random. He seems to have decent control over whatever thoughts had almost struck them with lightning earlier.

They walk only another few moments longer before his hands spark so hard that a baby lighting strike hits the ground and makes a cute, little dent in it, leaving the spot scorched black.

“Wow,” he says, looking at the damage. “Look at your spark.”

When he looks back up at Keith his cheeks are flushed like he’s embarrassed. Or maybe he imagines it.

“I don’t know how to make it stop.”

“Hey,” Lance says. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t seem to be  _ that _ dangerous.”

Actually it was very obviously a little dangerous, but Lance was aiming for helpful reassurance, so he avoided emphasizing that. 

“I guess,” Keith says. “But it could be. I can’t even touch you without shocking you.”

“It’s fine,” Lance says, even though he’s been contemplating holding Keith’s hand for miles now, and he felt it was an epic Shakespearean tragedy that he probably couldn’t without being electrocuted. 

“Sure,” Keith says, though he sounds entirely uncertain. They let the subject drop, lapsing into silence again as they continue walking on.

The air is dreary and sad now, foggy like an early morning. There are empty houses lining the seemingly never-ending road. An occasional tree, barren and practically dead, appears beside some of these abandoned homes. When Lance glances behind them, scarcely working up the courage to everytime, the giant presence is always following in the distance. It swallows up everything in its path forward.

He figures the best thing to do is ignore it, although he feels as though it is inside of his head already. He wonders if Keith feels it, too, and if he should ask. Only after another eon of walking does he grow the courage, or the boredom, to.

“Yeah, I do,” Keith says. “It’s messing with us.”

“Isn’t everything?”

Keith hums in agreement. “We’ve walked enough that we could probably take a break.”

He wants to. His legs ache terribly, his throat hurts for no seeming reason, and he has a killer headache. Also he’s going to bleed through his sleeves soon, if he hasn’t already. 

“I need to take a nap,” he says in summary. 

“You can’t. We’ve been over this already.”

Right. Possible inception-type happening if they fall asleep. “I didn’t say I would. Just that I want to.”

“Me, too.”

Conveniently, Lance sees something past the long line of houses. It’s too good to be true, probably. He asks Keith to be sure. 

“Am I going insane or is that an oasis?”

Keith squints towards where Lance is indicating. It looks like a small body of water, like a pond surrounded by trees with actual leaves on them, albeit blue ones. Same color family, at least. 

“I think so?” Keith says, and grabs at Lance’s hand despite his sparks, to lead them both towards it.

  
  


 

 

Lance sighs at the feel of the water on his bare skin. He hopes it is dark and foggy enough to hide the vines that wrap themselves around his arms. He wants to rip them out of his skin. But he’s sure they would grow back just as soon as he did. Also it would fucking hurt.

He’s contemplating how he could manage to get the thorns out when something floats towards him, small underneath the water. Lance watches it approach, too tired and too comfortable to do anything but.

A frog sticks its head out from the surface, and uses its sticky little hands to climb onto a large floating leaf, perching there in wait. 

Lance stares at it. It blinks. He’s pretty sure frogs don’t blink, on account of they don’t have eyelids. Or maybe that was lizards. At this point who knows what is and isn’t supposed to be doing anything. 

It blinks once more. Then opens its smiling mouth. Disturbingly, it has human teeth. 

“Hey.”

Lance almost has a heart attack.

He splutters. “Keith. Keith, come here.”

“What?” Keith asks from several feet away, where he is wading in the water.

“Please tell me this frog didn’t just speak to me.”

The frog blinks. Keith swims towards him. The frog turns towards Keith.

“Hello,” it says. Keith splutters.

“The fuck?”

“Please mind your language.”

“Why?” Lance asks. “You’re a frog.”

“It’s uncouth.”

“But you’re a frog,” Keith says.

“Fuck you, then.”

“Jesus,” Lance says. “A hypocritical frog.”

“Hey. You started it.”

“Okay. So what are you supposed to represent?”

The frog blinks once again. “I don’t know. That’s your thing.”

Okay. So Lance had always had an affinity towards frogs as a child. He’d find them in his yard all the time, tiny, fragile little things. He’d pick them up, feel their little skeletons beneath the thinness of their skin. And then he would walk towards the lake, which he now sees uncannily resembles this one, and put them back.

This clears up nothing. 

“You’re just a little childhood memento,” he guesses. 

“Who says I’m yours?”

“Hu?”

The frog looks pointedly, or as pointedly as a frog can, at Keith. It’s beady little eyes water as it peers at him, scrutinizing.

“I don’t know you, frog,” Keith says. Lance wants to laugh at the absurdity.

The frog seems annoyed. If it could stomp its little feet it would. It does.

“You’re forgetful as always. Stupid butthead.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Keith, it’s a frog.”

“I know that, Lance.”

“You’re a stupid butthead, too.”

“Shut up, frog.”

“Oh my god.”

Of all the things they’ve encountered thus far, this is the one that confuses Lance the most. What does a frog have to do with Keith. Why is it Keith’s frog. 

“Go away,” Keith says.

“Not until you admit I’m yours.”

“It was an accident.”

“But you still feel bad.”

“Well, yeah. Obviously.”

“Hm. You feel bad for stupid things. Get over it.”

“You were all dried up.”

“Yeah, yeah. You lost me. I dried up. You found me all beef-jerkied. Get over it.”

“Keith,” Lance says. “Is this seriously your greatest childhood trauma? You accidentally lost a pet frog?”

“I don’t think that’s the point he’s trying to make,” Keith says.

“Nah,” the frog says. “My point is your guilt. Dad dies. Your fault. Shiro leaves. Your fault. You can’t hold onto things. You lose them so easily. Don’t you think that means something?”

“Shut up,” Keith says, and then lifts his palm and smashes it.

“Jesus Christ,” Lance says, staring at the frog paste. It’s just green stuff, no squashed frog organs to speak of. “You killed it.”

“Not like it’s real,” Keith says, though he does sound a little guilty. 

“Still. He’s squished. You squished him.”

“It’s fine,” Keith says. 

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah…” Keith trails off with a look of confusion. His breath catches after another second, and he looks down into the water like there’s something there.

“What?” Lance says.

“I feel something.”

“Where?”

Keith swims in a little circle, and then starts towards Lance, arms reaching out for him. “My feet.”

Lance doesn't have time to respond. Keith opens his mouth like to shout except he doesn’t have time to do that, either, because there is a splash, frantically waving arms, and then Keith is gone.

Lance’s brain takes too long to catch up. He stares at the spot where Keith had just been, at the rippling still from Keith’s swimming towards him.

“Shit,” he hisses. “Shit shit shit. Oh my god.”

He dives under. His eyes hurt to open in the water, but he has to. He can’t see anything well. He thinks the water has turned purple, or maybe it’s dark red. Either way, it’s unnatural and reminds him of blood. He twists his body to get a better peripheral, and hears a sound like muffled yelling. He turns towards it.

There’s Keith. Hair everywhere in the water, tugging at a giant jellyfish that has wrapped around him, pulling him under as he tries to get away. Lance swims to him as quickly as he can. He realizes halfway that he’s quickly running out of breath. That doesn’t matter, though. He needs to reach Keith. 

Keith is still tugging at the jellyfish, its tentacles wrapped tightly around his legs and reaching to twist around his lower torso. Lance can tell he’s quickly losing energy, because with each jerk of his body backwards it takes him just a second longer to come back for another. And it’s not doing any good. The jellyfish is squeezing hard, turning his limbs white. 

He reaches him as quickly as he can but not quickly enough. He puts his hands on Keith and looks at him. His face is red, eyes hazy and unfocused over. Maybe it's the blur of Lance’s vision in the water, or maybe it’s the pain. Lance ignores that for now, because as always he can’t stand Keith in pain long enough to function properly. He needs to function properly.

_ Control it,  _ Lance mouths in the water.

Keith just shakes his head. Lance isn’t sure if it’s because he doesn’t think he can or because he doesn’t understand. Maybe both.

They are being dragged under, slowly but inevitably. The more time this takes the longer it will be to break the surface once they’ve escaped. Lance squishes Keith’s face between his hands and presses his forehead to Keith’s. He floats above him, legs floating upwards and careful to avoid the tentacles. He can’t speak underwater. If only he could. But he needs to convey this. So he thinks it as hard as he can. Maybe his words will manifest somehow. All he needs is for Keith to feel them.

Keith shakes. His hands cling tightly onto Lance’s waist, so tightly it hurts. They are losing breath quickly, coughing up bubbles. Lance squeezes his face tighter. Something wraps itself around his right leg, squeezing so hard it goes numb in seconds. He doesn’t dare look down at it. He focuses on Keith.

And then, just as quickly as it had constricted him, the tentacle loosens and slides away. He opens his eyes and looks down.

The tentacles have turned into seaweed, have loosened and slipped slowly off their bodies like melting butter. Lance watches them fall and drown in the darkness of the seemingly bottomless lake. Then he turns back to Keith, who is passed out. 

He tugs Keith against his body and swims upwards, kicking his legs with as much strength as he can until they break the surface. Keith is limp in his arms, so small and light it scares him. He pulls him towards the edge of the pool of water, where he can prop him up against a rock. Then he slaps him across the face.

“Keith,” he says. His voice is all awkward, desperate and embarrassing but he can’t help it. “Keith, wake the fuck up.”

Keith coughs once in response. Then he spits up green goo. It’s gross. Lance wipes it away from his chin and chest with his fingers until it’s all gone, and holds Keith so he doesn’t slip under water.

“Shit,” Keith mumbles, and then coughs again, this time sans green goo. His eyes are still closed, brows knitted in obvious pain.

“Keith,” Lance says. His voice, once again, easily gives away his worry. 

“Shit, it hurts. Lance, it hurts.”

“I know,” Lance says. Keith’s body is covered in marks, red and raised from where the tentacles had wrapped themselves around him. It probably stings like hell. “I’m sorry. Just stay still, okay?”

“Okay,” Keith says. His hands are clenched. “Okay. It hurts.”

“Yeah, I know. Stay still,” he says again, then works up the biggest spitball he can and spits all over Keith’s chest.

“The fuck?” Keith asks, appalled but not angry. 

“It’s all I can think of besides to pee on you.”

“Pretty sure the pee thing is a myth,” Keith says weakly.  

Lance laughs. “Whatever, man,” he says, and uses gentle hands to spread his spit over the marks. He grabs at some leaves by the rocks and presses them to the skin on Keith’s chest and upper arms.

“That actually helps,” Keith says, clearly surprised.

“I’m glad,” Lance says, and pushes Keith’s wet hair out of his face. “You look like a mop.”

Keith laughs, tired and raggedy. It sounds sort of like a sob. He props himself up a little and rests his forehead against Lance’s shoulder. His movements are stiff and careful, hands pressed to Lance’s hips as support.

_ “  _ Asshole,” he mumbles into the bare skin just there.

“You’re the asshole,” Lance says, fonder than he means. “You scared me.”

“Thanks for saving me.”

“I didn't. You did.”

“Nah,” Keith says, and lifts his forehead from Lance’s shoulder to look at him. “I heard you. Even though you weren’t talking, I heard it in my head. It was kind of creepy, but it helped.”

“Oh,” Lance says. “Well, no problem.”

They are so close to each other. Lance wants to kiss him so badly. But Keith is trembling and his arms and legs and chest are so fucked it kind of hurts to look at. He’s got blue-colored leaves stuck to him with spit and water. They’re asleep in the real world. They’re trapped in this dream world. Everything is so fucked. It’s just that right now, looking at Keith and his mop hair and his weak smile, Lance can’t help but think they’ll be entirely fine.

“The thing is gonna catch up to us,” Keith says.  

“We’ll deal with it when it does.”

“Damnit,” Keith mumbles. “Damnit.”

“Keith, chill. It’s okay. Whatever happens, we’ll be together at least.”

Keith doesn’t look convinced, but he kicks a little closer in the water even though they are already so close, and he holds tighter to Lance in support. He looks down and then back up again, too quickly for Lance to realize and stop him.

“Your arms,” he says. 

Lance looks down at said arms. The vines have curled more tightly, more painfully around him. Their thorns press deeply into his arms. Blood has caked itself so dry on his skin that the water hasn’t washed it away. 

“Oh,” is all he can say.

“How long have those been there?”

“Um, for a bit.”

“A bit,” Keith repeats, and he sounds pissed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t wanna… it’s not a big deal. I’ve been dealing.”

“You’ve been  _ bleeding.  _ That’s why you’ve been all spacey and making random ouch noises.”

Ouch noises. Keith is cute. Fuck. His arms hurt. Keith is worried about him. Which makes him feel so guilty except his chest hurts in that achey, warm way. The contrast makes everything hurt that much more.

“I’m sorry,” Lance says. Keith studies him. A new, blue glow emits from the water and reflects prettily on his face. He’s so beautiful, Lance thinks. He’s also definitely pissed. 

“You spout all that bullshit about being there for each other, being a team and opening up and not keeping things in because it will only be worse in the end, and then you act like this. Not just here, but in the real world, too. I notice it. I’m not blind.”

“It’s not bullshit,” Lance says. 

“Then act like it. Don’t be a hypocrite.”

“Jesus, you don’t pull your punches, do you?” Lance knew this already. He can’t even be mad. 

“Tell me when something’s wrong,” Keith says, squeezing Lance’s waist in emphasis, where he is still holding as support. Lance wonders about that juxtaposition; of Keith insisting this as he holds onto Lance to keep from probably drowning without.

“Even if I can’t help,” Keith says. “Just tell me. I can listen. I care about you. You don’t have to hide things from me.”

“Are you for real?”

“Of course I’m fucking real.”

“No,” Lance says. He doesn’t mean it like Keith thinks. He seriously can’t tell if his brain is making this up. It seemed all too much like something the dreamstuff could easily trick him with. “I mean… nevermind.”

“Your vines,” Keith says, anger dissipating so fast it confuses him. 

Lance looks down again. Small pink flowers grow from his vines like in a time lapse, and bloom even faster, as though Keith is the sun and they’ve been deprived. They’ve gotten Keith’s fingers and wrapped themselves around his wrists, stopping there. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, even though at the moment he doesn’t know what that even means. He’s too busy staring at the flowers, at Keith’s hands and arms. He’s too busy thinking how angry Keith had been just a second ago and how beautiful he is now, gazing curiously at the flowers. 

Keith is so beautiful even absolutely exhausted. His hair is a tangled ruin. His eyes are red like he’s just wanted to cry. Lance hopes to the universe that he hasn’t made him want to cry.

The vines grow taller and longer, until they’ve created a canopy above them, leaves and flowers tangling down unto them. They are cocooned, safe and contained as they stand in this lake that glows blue, breathing each other’s air and surrounded by this garden. This is absolutely a dream.

“Lance,” Keith breathes.

“Hu?”

“Your eyes.”

“My eyes.”

Keith looks pointedly upwards. “They’re reflecting.”

Lance lifts a hand to reach upwards, the other still on Keith to support, and one lands gently on the tips of his fingers like a kiss. One of a million small, glowing lights that fall from the flowers like pollen.  

When he looks at Keith the colors of them are reflecting in his eyes, which are wide and watching. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

“Do you think this is dangerous?” He asks. His voice is so soft.

“No,” Lance says, because it’s the only answer that makes any sense. Something so beautiful couldn’t hurt them.  

But maybe that was naive to think. Lance knew something so beautiful he hurt to look at, and he hurt to think about, and he was right here in front of him. 

“Look,” Keith is saying, and Lance does. The colors of the lights have become shades of the same red, matching the flowers and so soft a shade. It was red like a heart pumping, like chapped lips, like love. It was red like Keith.

He can’t stand it. He’s never felt so sick with love and it terrifies him. He urges the lights around them to fade, because they hurt to see reflected in Keith’s eyes. They land gently on their bare skin and in the water, and melt away like snow. The vines shrink and grow backwards, twisting themselves back around Lance’s arms, flowers receding to buds, to nothing.

Keith is silent. The air is heavy with something Lance can’t quite place. 

“It’s gone,” Keith finally says.

“Yeah,” Lance says. “Nice while it lasted.”

Keith looks at him. For a moment Lance thinks he’s figured him all out, but a second later the look flickers away. 

“It was really beautiful,” he says. “It felt almost alive.”

“Everything here feels alive.”

“That’s true. But some things more than others, I think.”

“Yeah,” Lance says. “Yeah, I think so, too.”

  
  


 

Keith is too hurt to move excessively. It takes some time for them to completely detach from each other, and even then, the vines are stubborn and reaching. They don’t really acknowledge whatever implications that give. Lance has sort of given up on everything.

Keith’s breath is raggedy and his movements are staggered. They’ve been walking for what seems like hours, but slowly, and the giant looming presence is catching up. He knows Keith feels it, too, the way it seeps into their skin and makes a home there, sticky and gross and calling for them.

He hates how much pain Keith is in. He hides it well, just as he always does, but Lance knows from months of practice and countless battles when Keith is hiding something. He sort of prided himself on the skill. It was a practical one.

“Maybe we should just go in,” he says, after Keith trips over literally nothing.  

“Why in the world would we do that?”

“Listen,” Lance says. “Isn’t the point to confront these things? This thing has been chasing us since the beginning, and we both know we can’t outrun it. Maybe we should just bite the bullet, and see what’s in there that wants to meet us so bad.”

Keith bites his lip and slows his walking. Lance wants to tell him to stop, because they’re already chapped and bleeding, but instead he waits him out.

“Fine,” Keith says finally, but definitely not like he likes the idea. “But we don’t lose each other. Whatever wants us we face together, okay?”

“Deal,” Lance says.

“So then what? Do we, just, turn around?”

Lance grabs Keith’s hand. “Yup,” he says, with as much confidence as he can muster, which is just a fraction more than he initially expected. Still, he’ll take what he can get. 

  
  


 

 

He hates whatever rulebook exists for this dreamworld they’re so stuck in. They’ve tried for days or weeks or months to create some distance between themselves and the giant presence following them, to absolutely no avail. And yet it takes almost nothing to find themselves just in front of it. It seems to have paused in its path forward. Maybe because it has nothing to chase anymore, now that they’ve made this decision.

Lance cranes his neck to look upwards, but there’s no end to what he sees.  

He doesn’t know what it is. His brain can’t comprehend it, has absolutely no concept or idea of what it might be, despite that he’s looking right at it. It is everything all at once. Each time he blinks it becomes something new. This terrifies him.

“Ready?” He asks, despite everything.

Keith stares at the giant presence, mouth agape like he too can’t comprehend what he’s looking at. Lance hears him swallow hard, and then he nods his head in affirmation, slowly and evenly.

“Yes,” he says. Even now he says this with confidence and assurance. Lance always understood why they’d chosen him to be leader in Shiro’s absence, but in moments like these it made that much more sense.

“Are you?” He asks, looking at Lance and away from the presence, away from the tendrils of dark smoke that reach out towards them from within it, beckoning, begging. 

Lance smiles, ignoring how it wavers. “Ready are you are.”

Keith smiles back. Lance draws comfort in that. They stand side by side and hand in hand, and allow the smoke to wrap around them and seep into their skin, pulling them inside.

  
  


 

 

The closest thing Lance could come to describing it was a dark and endless forest. But there were houses lining some areas like an abandoned neighborhood, and there were things floating in the air, suspended or else moving towards something they couldn’t see. There were street lamps emerging from swampy ponds, their light casting a dim orange shadow over everything, reflecting creepily off the countless colors of the trees, which reached neverendingly upwards.

They pass an empty grocery store. And an old gas station hidden in a canopy, neon lights advertising a car wash. They walk through snow that reflects green and that leaves them both shivering and numb. They walk through a cityscape, through buildings overtaken by aged trees, its walls graffitied with ominous and often incoherent warnings. 

They walk through screaming fog, past human corpses and carcasses of animals he’s never seen before. They walk past a tree that speaks to them. They walk on water. They swim in ground clouds. There are motels and cars, a large glowing orb, a small moon that floats close enough to the ground to reach if they stretched, and hybrid animals that screech at them. 

These things don’t hurt them, strangely enough. Both he and Keith are attentive, and ready for a fight if needed. But the animals and the trees only speak to them. They insult them, scream and shout with the voices of people they know. But they never move to attack them. It almost feels as though they are waiting for something.

Keith has just finished telling a bird with shards of glass for wings to fuck off when Lance spots a small shack nearby. It looks homely and innocent enough, and at this point Lance can’t even guess how long they’ve been walking. His mind and body are exhausted. He’s tired of listening to creatures tell him only the deepest parts of his brain could know to hurt him with. He’s sure Keith is, too.

“We should rest,” he says. Keith nods in agreement, and the two of them trudge towards the shack. As they do the path towards it becomes narrower, everything around them caving in. They ignore this, out of sheer stupidity or exhaustion, Lance can’t care to acknowledge, on account of he is stupid and exhausted. 

Keith leads them inside. It’s a cute little place. There is one small futon shoved into the corner and a microwave stacked atop a mini fridge beside it. The rest of the small area is covered in books and notebooks, papers scattered haphazardly and sprawled with nonsensical ink. Keith seems to purposefully ignore this for the futon, not taking even a moment to assess. Lance wants to ask him if he knows this place, but the way Keith’s body plops lazily onto the futon is all too inviting. He goes to join him.

Keith scooches over to make room before Lance plops down beside him. They lay side by side. It’s not an unfamiliar way to be, but the futon is smaller and they are even colder than usual, and there is no blanket and no pillow. Typical.

“Wanna, like, share heat?” Keith asks.

“More like you steal all of mine,” Lance says, because he’s already entangling their limbs, probably before Keith even asked, and Keith is freezing as he typically is.  

Keith laughs and nudges closer, grabbing Lance’s hand and sticking it underneath his shirt like that’s the most normal thing in the world, and Lance lets him because he’s weak and stupid.

“I can’t help being an ice pack.”

Lance feigns a sigh and sticks his other hand underneath Keith’s shirt, too, rubbing circles with them both and ignoring the way Keith melts into him, ignoring the way his leg is tucked neatly between both of Lance’s and his hair tickles Lance’s face.

“And I can’t help being a furnace, I suppose. You owe me… something.”

“I owe you a lot of things, probably.”

“Nah,” Lance says. “Actually, it’s the other way around.”

Keith sticks his bottom lip out in that way he does when he’s confused. Lance doesn’t know how to elaborate in a way that would ease his confusion. It might be weird to say Keith has saved him more times than he can count, and not just in battle. That he’s usually the first person he thinks about when he’s about ready to give up, and that he’s the reason he’s still sane after all this time away from Earth, away from his family. It made so much sense in his head, but he thinks if he tried to articulate it aloud, the words would be impossibly messy. 

“Just,” he says. “You’re important to me, okay?”

“Yeah, I know I am,” Keith says, cheeky and with a smirk. Lance pinches him lightly on the stomach and he yelps and then laughs.

“Kidding,” he says, and then softens. It is quiet for a moment as they look at each other. Lance thinks he recognizes that look, but he can never tell if its wishful imagining. Now more than ever he has to be careful.

“You’re important to me, too,” Keith says finally. “Now give me your arm.”

“Hu?”

But Keith is already grabbing Lance’s forearm and moving it underneath his head to use as a pillow. He shoves his own underneath Lance’s head to be used as the same. This way they will have to face each other for however long they lay here. It must be horribly uncomfortable for Keith, what with his head on lumpy plant vines. But he doesn’t seem to mind and Lance won’t be the one to point out that he should. 

“Rest,” Keith says, and closes his eyes. Lance looks at him for just a little longer, and then closes his eyes, too. Their breaths sync together. He thinks he could almost fall asleep. Inception be damned. With his body nearly falling off the side and his heat being stolen and Keith’s bony arm as a pillow, Lance has never been more comfortable.

  
  


 

He doesn’t know how long they lay there. Maybe just a few hours, maybe a few minutes or maybe a few days. But he feels heat against his skin. He ignores it until he can’t anymore, and in retrospect it was stupid to ignore it for so long. 

“Dammit,” Keith says, right in Lance’s ear, and then again, like he knows exactly what this is. “We shouldn’t have stayed here.”

Lance props himself up only to find there’s nowhere to go. The whole place is on fire. “Why?” He asks in lieu of panicking. Character development, he thinks. 

“It’s my Dad,” Keith says, staring angrily at the flames like the sheer strength of his stare will make them go away. “This is the house we lived in.”

Lance knows it’s not real but the heat hurts. If the flames reach them it will burn.

“Keith. You need to chill. Literally.”

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder.”

“Shut up, Lance.”

And normally he would. But he doesn’t think it’ll help the matter and the flames are licking at their feet, teasing them.

“Keith. Listen. Whatever this dream is trying to tell you, you need to listen and respond. Don’t ignore it.”

“I don’t want this.”

“I know. But you need it. That’s why it’s happening.”

“Fuck this. How am I supposed to control literal fire?”

“It’s a metaphor or something, dude. I don’t know. But you can. You already have.”

“Shit,” Keith says, and squeezes his eyes shut. “Just… give me a second.”

“Okay,” Lance says, as comforting as he can. He presses his knees closer to his body to avoid the approaching fire.

“Okay,” Keith says, to himself or the fire or Lance he doesn’t know. “Okay. This is just anger or something. It’s messing with me. I’m not angry anymore. This happened a long time ago.”

“Keith,” Lance says, eyeing the enlarging fire. “I think it’s getting angrier.”

Keith curses. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Then just tell me. What happened?”

“I’m not-- I can’t. That will make it worse.”

“It’s already worse. Maybe it’s just trying to make you remember something.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I know. But you can trust me.”

“I do trust you,” Keith says, almost angry, like he can’t believe Lance has said something so stupidly obvious. It makes the flames flicker and Lance’s heart stutter and then start again. 

“So tell me,” he says. “Remember what you said before? Even if I can’t help. I can listen. I care about you.” It’s an exact echo. Lance knows because he memorized it.

“The house burnt,” Keith says. He’s crying now. Lance has only ever seen him cry once before, and it hurt just as much as it does now. He puts two hands on Keith’s knees.

“It caught on fire and burnt to nothing,” Keith goes on. “And he was inside.”

“Keith…”

“It was my fault,” Keith says, and the flames around them stutter, like with each word Keith speaks they are stolen of more oxygen. “He would have lived, but I couldn’t get myself out. He came back in for me.”

“He’s your dad,” Lance says. “He wasn’t going to leave you.”

“But I could have gotten out. I was just scared, and stupid. I could have gotten myself out, and he would still be here.”

In his lap Keith’s hands spark. He clenches them into fists, but they buzz, lightning unhappily trapped.

“It’s not your fault, Keith,” Lance says. “You were a child. Of course you were scared. Of course he went back in for you. He’s your dad. You would have done the same.”

Keith looks at Lance. There are flames in his eyes. They are not a reflection of those around them. It’s the saddest thing Lance has ever seen.

“I miss him. More than anything.”

“That’s okay,” Lance says. “That’s okay.”

The flames around them shrink and flicker out, leaving the air dry and scarcely breathable. And they sit there, unscathed, everything around them burnt to nothing. Keith cries, so silently but his chest heaves with each sob.

  
  
  


 

“I don't think it’s just current emotions,” Keith says. They’ve left the burnt shack behind to move forward again. Or maybe not forward. In some unknown direction. Maybe in circles.

“I think it’s taking from the past, too,” Keith goes on. “Or what we were once prone to.”

“Like what?”

“Like, I don’t know. I haven’t felt that angry for a long time, but it still came up.”

Lance doesn’t know if that was anger, per se, but he goes with it. “Seemed pretty angry during that dungeons and dragons game last week. You know, when you rolled a two.”

“Lance.”

“Okay. No, I get it. I’m a lot more emotionally stable now than I was two years ago.” Although arguably not by a lot. “But yeah, stuff’s still coming up.”

“Which makes things more complicated. It doesn’t matter if we can control our emotions, they’ll still try and kill us anyway.”

“Seems kind of unreasonable on their part.”

“Yeah,” Keith says, nodding in agreement.

The leaves shuffle like they have something to say. Lance hears a noise amongst it that sends shivers up his spine.

“You hear that?” He whispers to Keith, who shakes his head in response. A moment later Lance hears it again, and watches Keith’s eyes widen as he does, too. 

They move quickly, hand in hand to find somewhere to hide. There’s nothing but a dense collection of trees around them.. Lance tugs at Keith’s hand, pulling them towards what he hopes is a thick enough patch to hide them safely from sight. 

They huddle close together and peer out from the spot they’ve chosen.

Something is prowling. It’s closer now than it was before. He wonders why they didn’t sense it coming any earlier. Lance can’t see it yet but he hears its breathing heavily, almost hungrily.

Keith’s grip hurts, but he doesn’t care.

It comes into view. It’s so giant. Gargantuan. Though it is still fairly far Lance can feel it’s overwhelming presence. He knows that it would easily and gladly sink its teeth into their bodies if it found them hiding here.

It drools. He can smell it, like rotting flesh and vomit. It’s eyes are dark, black orbs with no pupils, its fur long and matted, and everytime Lance blinks he thinks it becomes darker and wetter with blood. It’s his imagination, he urges his brain to believe. This is fear manifested. Fear feasting on more fear.

He’s never seen anything like it.

“What,” Keith says. “Is that?”

His voice is hushed and terrified. Lance feels terror in his chest, his heart thumping so hard he’s sure whatever is out there can hear it and will find them and it will be his fault.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But we need to get out of here.”

“How? Where is there to go?”

It’s true. They are surrounded by a mass of what is now swamp and jungle. It’s so concentrated that they would scarcely find a path to walk through even if they tried. But they didn’t have a choice. It was that or confront the beast, and Lance thinks, even with their combat experience, this was something they shouldn’t dare attempt.

“Or we can hide,” he says. “Stay put and hope it doesn’t find us.”

Keith frowns. “Not a good option either.”

“What else is there?” He knows as soon as he asks that Keith is going to answer something stupid, the exact thing that Lance has just thought impossible. It’s impossible. 

“Fight it.”

Apparently Keith doesn’t think so. 

“Shut up,” Lance says. “We can barely look at it.”

“It’s that or wait for it to find us.”

“We don’t have anything to fight with.”

“So? It’s our best option. We can’t die in a dream, Lance.`”

“Fuck,” he says. Something drips down his forehead, and he realizes its sweat. He wipes it away with the hand that’s not in Keith’s.

“So?” Keith urges.

“Fine,” Lance says. “But we need to figure out an actual plan. We can’t wing this like everything else.”

“I thought that was our specialty.”

“Sure it is. But this is different.”

“So we make a plan?”

“Yeah, something like that.” 

“Damn.”

Yeah, Lance thinks. He almost laughs at how unfamiliar  _ planning  _ is for them. They both had one-track minds. And this would be nearly impossible.

 

 

 

Lance watches as Keith practices his sparks for several minutes. He manages to hold them long enough that it could work as a weapon. It has to, because besides that and their own bodies, they’ve got nothing. And he would prefer to keep most, if not all, of his limbs. 

“Please be careful,” Lance says, when Keith gets that same look in his eyes he does every time they are about to go into battle.

“Only if you are, too,” Keith says.  

“You know I am.”

Keith smiles. “Yeah, I know.”

And then he rises from their crouched position and steps out of their hidden spot.  

The creature turns towards the sound of Keith emerging. Its giant steps have destroyed everything in its path, creating a makeshift arena of sorts. So they at least have room to move and attack. 

Fuck, Lance thinks, probably a little belatedly at this point. He really hopes this will work. He watches Keith make his way to the center of the space, keeping himself hidden so he can surprise the creature once Keith has gotten its full and undivided attention.

“Hey,” Keith says to the creature. It blinks once at him, slow and almost comical, and then it charges, mouth agape and teeth bloodied already, with what Lance has no idea.

Somehow Keith dodges it’s jaws and does some sort of inhumane maneuver that lands him on top of the creature. It makes Lance forget entirely that he’s still recovering from their previous encounters. Keith clutches onto its fur, squeezes his eyes shut, and sends out one of his lightning shocks. The force of it pulses through his entire body, lighting him up with purple. The creature’s body jolts, and it screams in fury before slamming its body into the ground to get Keith off.

Keith cries out as he hits the ground. The creature backs up so it can go directly for him, but Lance is quick and already out in the open. He lets out a guttural scream to get its attention. It turns towards him, hopefully giving Keith time enough to recover. Lance isn’t sure what to do now that it’s facing him, all previous plans having fallen out the spacious window. He decides instead to do exactly what they'd agreed not to, and just wing it. 

“C’mere,” he says, and pats his thighs to egg the creature on. He feels like a matador, but Veronica hates bullfights on account of they’re immoral, so maybe not. The creature blinks once at him, huffs out of its giant, grossly mucusy nostrils, and obeys. 

He just barely avoids it. As it is the entire left side of his body skims its fur and he is left stinging like nothing he’s ever felt before. Thankfully the pain is not so bad that he is rendered useless, but it’s walking a supremely thin line. His hand fucking burns where he’d reached out to touch it as it passed, but he thinks his vague notion of an idea worked. 

His vines are twisted around the creature's front leg and some of its upper torso, squeezing tightly enough that its muscle and fat squish between them. It is definitely not happy about any of that, given the sounds its making. When it screams, it sounds like everyone he knows. He thinks he hears his mother in there, and Keith, too. On second though he’s gonna pass out.

“Lance!” Keith calls out. He’s already up, per usual during a fight. Lance turns towards him even though he should probably pay attention to the creature, since it is absolutely furious at him, but in the moment he can’t help it. 

“Watch it!” Keith screams at him. Lance glances back towards the creature in time to dodge its attack. He thanks his deft reflexes for how quickly he is able to, and also for the burst of adrenaline as he sprints towards Keith, screaming to be heard over the creature's roars. 

“I have an idea!”

“Great,” Keith says, running the perimeter of the space to distract the creature. “What is it?”

“Plants are flammable. If I manage to get enough wrapped around him, maybe you can try and catch it on fire with your fancy lightning.”

“Burn it to death?!” Keith shouts as the beast screams over him. He winces at the sound of it. Lance wonders if they hear the same thing. The voices are probably different for him. 

“Yeah!” He says. “Can you distract it long enough for me to get him wrapped up? Then we switch and you do the thing.”

“Yeah,” Keith screams, and slides so fucking smoothly underneath the belly of the creature as it moves forward to attack him, so he is quickly behind the creature and beside Lance, giving them just enough time before it will orient itself towards them again. 

“Careful,” Lance says, assessing Keith. His hair is everywhere and his eyes are sort of manic. Both typical features of Keith during a battle. Lance had taken to bringing scrunchies for him in the real world, but they don't really have time for him to be thinking about that now. 

“You’re already injured from before and now you’re bruised," Lance says. "I can’t imagine what the rest of you is like.”

Actually he could. He has. Again, he tells himself, now is not the time. Definitely not the time.

“I’ll be fine. You trust me. I trust you.”

It’s not a question. Lance wonders, not for the first time, when they got to this point. He sort of wishes he could have seen it coming. Maybe he would have changed some things towards the beginning. He wouldn't have taken so long to figure it out. 

“With my life,” Lance says. Keith looks at him in a way he doesn’t recognize, and then he nods. 

“Ready?” He asks. 

Lance nods. Keith squeezes his hand once, breathes heavily once, and then takes off again, sprinting to the opposite side of the perimeter to get the creature away from Lance. Lance watches long enough to be sure Keith will be okay, and then, when the creature is again distracted by Keith, he takes his step forward.

It is not easy. Lance knew this going in, but it is the hardest thing he has ever done. The creature refuses to pay attention to Keith long enough for Lance to get any good tanglings in. He has to dodge its jaws, each time closer than the next and leaving him just a little closer to metaphorical, or perhaps literal, death.

As time passes, faces begin to appear in the creature’s fur, melting and morphing from its skin. They scream, gore and blood dripping from their mouths and noses and eyes to the ground so he slips on it with each step. They are people he knows. People he loves. They beg him to end them. He tries to blink them away but they won’t stop begging. 

He stops breathing, watching as Keith is distracted by someone he recognizes in the creature’s fur and takes a bad hit, flying across the space and landing hard enough Lance hears the sound of his impact. He’s quick to get up, disoriented but seemingly fine. He is also angrier, and he sparks his fingers to taunt the creature once again. Lance reaches towards its hind legs and manages to get them wrapped in his vines. He tugs just to annoy it, and maybe to distract it enough to allow Keith time to breathe for once in his life. 

“Okay!” Lance says, stepping backwards as the creature breathes onto him, and ignoring his family’s screams from inside of the creature’s mouth as it widens its jaws to consume him. “Now, Keith!”

Keith takes a running start. Even now, injured and exhausted, he still has the strength and as always it leaves Lance in awe. He tumbles onto the back of the creature and holds tightly enough to avoid being thrown off as the creature swings itself around in an attempt to get him off. Lance hopes Keith's hands won’t be torn apart by the thorns of his vines. He watches as Keith clenches his fingers more tightly into the creature’s fur, and squeezes his eyes shut in concentration.

The vines pulse with purple light and are set ablaze. The creature shudders and screams horribly. It burns and burns and throws Keith off in its fury, too far for Lance to get to him while the creature is so berserk. It throws its body to the ground with a thud that shakes the entire space, and rolls around but the flames are too large and too hot. Stubborn just like Keith. And it burns.

The creature screams, a thousand horrid voices in one. The faces of his family and the people he loves melt away. In the end only ash is left. It blows away so easily with his breath, and there is nothing. 

Keith is standing just opposite of Lance. They stare together at the emptiness the creature has left, and then, when the shock has passed, at each other. 

Keith's chest is heaving. Lance is struck by how absolutely small he is, and by how strong he is, and by how the juxtaposition of these things make so little sense but is true nonetheless. Underneath Lance's hands, Keith is soft, skin always chill to the touch. His cheeks blush so easily, when he's angry, sad, embarrassed. His hair is an absolute mess and he never cares. His voice still cracks sometimes. 

And here, looking at him, hair stuck to his forehead with sweat, face smudged with what could be blood or dirt or both, eyes manic and dark and a shade of blue or purple or something Lance is always so frustrated trying to figure out, everything about him is wild and reckless and alive. Thank God. He’s alive.

Lance takes a stuttering step towards him. His entire body aches like nothing he’s ever felt before, like he’s just been hit by a truck, but he  _ needs _ to get to Keith. He absolutely needs to hold him and he feels like another second of not doing exactly this is another closer to literally dying. He’s so fucking dramatic, but this time he really thinks it might be true. 

He means to ask. He really does. But he doesn’t get the chance to. Because Keith is surging forward so fast Lance is almost afraid he’s coming to punch him in the face. He wouldn't know what for, but he doesn't know much of anything anymore and it would probably be warranted. 

Keith closes the distance between them in less than a second, and then his hands are clutching so tightly into Lance’s arms he almost cries out, but whatever sound he was about to make is swallowed by Keith’s mouth on his. They fall together to the ground. He hardly feels the impact.

Keith is so. He’s so. He doesn’t have the words for it and doesn’t know what's happening. Keith is on top of him, straddling his entire torso, legs squeezing his sides. His chest is against Lance’s chest, his hands are underneath Lance’s shirt and everywhere, like he needs to touch him to be sure. Lance understands the sentiment. He reciprocates the sentiment. 

And his mouth. His lips are so freaking soft. He kisses Lance so hard it bruises. And when he pulls away to breathe his eyes are glazed like he can't believe what's happening, either. For a moment they just look at each other, breathing each other’s air. Lance cranes his neck upwards to meet him halfway again.

“I don’t know if this is real,” he mumbles into Keith’s mouth.  

“It is,” Keith responds. Lance is surprised he understands him, what with the way he refuses to detach his mouth from Lance to say it. He has to pull away to get him to listen long enough. Keith pouts, upset about this. Lance puts a thumb on his bottom lip, and it drops, like he’s waiting for something. This is the most impatient Lance has ever seen him. 

“How can I believe you?” He asks. 

“Lance,” Keith says, grabbing at the hand at his mouth and pulling it away. He places it instead on his heart. Lance feels it beating so clearly. Its too fast, a rapid tempo, but he’s sure his own would match perfectly. 

“I’m not a dream. I’m real,” Keith says. “I promise you.”

His sister used to carry a journal in her back pocket and pull it out every time she thought of something. Lance had always liked the idea, and when she’d caught him sneaking a peek at it, she'd given him one of his own.

It had a tan cover and no lines on the pages. The first thing he wrote about was catching a dandelion fluff in midair, and then realizing afterwards, that now it could never land softly someplace, and begin to grow.

He’d forgotten that part of himself amidst surviving and battling and fighting for the universe in space. The part of him that was always so careful of life. That had cried when he’d stepped on a snail and cracked its shell, and that admired the way the rollie pollies in the backyard would curl up in the palm of his hand. The part of him that loved so deeply and without reason, even when it hurt more than anything. 

In this universe, he’d forgotten.

But he remembers now. When Keith kisses him again, softer this time, gentler like he’s trying to slot their lips perfectly together, like he’s trying to prove something, and with his palm still on Keith’s chest. Keith trusts him with everything. Somehow, for reasons he can’t yet understand, Keith trusts him with his heart.

He remembers now. 

  
  


 

 

“So,” Lance says. “What now?”

Keith is pink-faced and breathless. Lance can relate. He is also having a hard time focusing on anything but Keith. He could understand why Allura had once told them romance as a member of Voltron was strictly prohibited. He wonders how they were going to deal with that when they returned, but it was the sort of thing to worry about later. 

“I dunno," Keith says. "Keep going?”

“That whole thing seemed too climactic for us to just have to keep going.”

"Yeah, I'm sorry for essentially pouncing on you," Keith says. "I just..." He trails off, leaving Lance to imagine what he means to say. He could imagine a lot. 

"It's okay," Lance says, and reaches out to squeeze Keith's hand. "It's more than okay, actually." 

"I kind of went a little crazy, though," Keith admits, though he doesn't allow Lance to pull his hand back away. "Actually I've been going a little crazy for a while now. That's your fault, you know." 

Lance ignores that horribly rude accusation. It's really not such a bad thing to be accused of anyway. "How long?"

"I don't really know, to be honest. I don't think I realized when it first started. Since the beginning, maybe, but it's gotten, like, larger." 

"Larger?" 

"Yeah," Keith says. He looks down like there is something there to see. "Like more overwhelming. You just... you have this thing." 

"I said that," Lance recalls. About Keith. It wasn't even so long ago. 

"You've stolen my words before, too. And it made so much sense when you said it, because it's the same for me." 

They're so bad at this. This entire conversation is so comically inarticulate, Lance knows. If they were the protagonists of some short story, titled something horribly generic like Keith and Lance: Saviors of the Universe, and this was their written dialogue, it'd be hard to follow and horrible to read. But somehow it works so they understand each other perfectly. They speak this same language. It's really always been that way.

"Since the beginning, hu?" Lance asks. 

"Shut up." 

"I didn't realize how crazy I'd been driving you." 

"Lance, seriously. Your ego is at stake." 

"My ego is perfectly healthy. Why didn't you tell me?" 

"Why didn't you?" 

Good question. "I was afraid," he says simply, and is surprised by how easily and honestly it comes out. "We were so rocky for so long, as teammates and as friends. I didn't want to lose you." 

"You wouldn't have." 

"I know that  _ now,  _ butthead. I didn't at the time." 

"Well, you won't lose me. Not then, not now, and not ever."  

It's so cheesy and cliche, like a line from a movie and Lance doesn't understand how he could deserve that. He pulls Keith in by the waist. He comes easily, smiling like he meant for this to happen. Lance wouldn't be surprised if he planned this, but he can't be annoyed at how easily he's given in. 

"Hey," Keith says. 

"Hey," Lance says back, and kisses him. This time is less desperate than the first, although there is still that undertone, maybe from knowing they've been walking the line for so long, both too afraid to step across it. 

But its softer now, and Keith hums so quietly into Lance's mouth and his fingers dance on Lance's skin and Lance holds him. It's too perfect. Of course it is. Lance should have known, looking back, that it was too perfect. 

His vines reach and wrap them together so delicately. 

"You've got me all tangled up," Keith says. Lance thinks he means it more than literally. 

"That's for shocking me all those times before," he says.  

Keith laughs. And kisses him on the nose. It's so. God. Lance wants to squish him to his body and never let him go. So he does and Keith laughs and makes a sound like he's uncomfortable except Lance knows he's not, because he could easily get away but instead he presses closer. 

"Sorry," he says, cheeky and smart, mumbling it into Lance's shoulder.  

"No, you're not." 

"No," Keith says. "I'm not." 

Again, for the billionth time, they move forward. Around them Lance thinks things are collapsing, growing backwards, or fading away like ghostly apparitions. He's hopeful that means this is finally over, but there's no grand exit, no glowing sign or godly voice telling them they've succeeded in their journey and can therefore go home.  

There's nothing to indicate this dream is finally over, that they can at last wake up into the real world having proven what they'd made out to. Nothing until there is. Lance sees it in the distance but not so far it won't take them just a few quick strides to reach it. It looks innocent enough. It stands alone, not a part of any structure, perfectly white and with a golden knob. A door.

He and Keith walk towards it. 

"Do you think that's it?" Keith asks, skepticism evident in his voice. They're trained to be skeptics, but at this point, there's really no way to know for sure. Lance says as much.

"So, should I?"

"Yeah," Lance says. "But hold onto me in case something, like, jumps out at us."

Keith nods and holds onto Lance's forearm. His expression turns serious. Lance almost laughs, once again, at the absurdity of the situation. How grave and careful they are being about turning a doorknob.

Keith reaches, and turns it, and then pushes the door open with a bump of his hip. 

Lance is… confused. To say the least. There's nothing there. The door opens to more of the same giant forest, just the other side of it. It's the same trees, the same ground, the same everything. 

"I don't get it," Lance says, but upon closer inspection, he notices there is a slight wavering to the air framed by the door. It looks rippled and slightly distorted, like the heat from an outdoor grill at an extended family gathering.  

Keith puts his hand in it. Impulsive as usual, and Lance is too slow to stop him. 

"Keith,” he says. “Why?"

"It's fine. Look," he says, and wiggles his hand. It does look fine. But something is off. Lance can feel it even though he can't pinpoint what it might be. 

"Don't go any further," he says, drawing nearer to inspect. Keith obeys, and then his eyes widen in shock. 

"Something's pulling at me," he says. 

"I told you not to stick your hand in!" 

"No, you didn't!" 

"It was a given, Keith!"

“Lance,” Keith says, suddenly more afraid in his voice, gripping more tightly onto his forearm.

Something invisible is dragging him in, and Lance realizes that Keith's entire arm is reflecting across the space as he is pulled further in. The air has become a mirror to the world they are in. Everything reflects, he realizes now. The trees that he had once thought were of the same world are mirror images. The odd creatures that float and the weirdly colored fog and now Keith, as he is pulled deeper and deeper into that other world.

Lance tries to shove his hand in but it just bounces off and stings and it hurts. The door won't let him pass. Fantastic. He shouldn’t be surprised. He’s pissed. 

Lance pulls at Keith instead, but the harder he does the faster Keith is take from him. Typical. Fuck. 

“I don’t know what to do,” he says. 

“Just pull harder,” Keith says, an echo of when they first began, what seems like a lifetime ago, trapped back to back in that little wooden cage. They're really not in such a different place now, he thinks.

It didn't work then, and Keith has to know it won't work now either. He is almost fully emerged in the other side, reflected across the mirror-like air.

“I’m trying,” Lance says, but it’s no use.

“Okay. Okay. Lance, stop. Just listen to me.”

“What?”

“Listen. I'm sorry," Keith says. "For being impulsive and never thinking before I do something. Not just now, but all the time. I just always trusted you to be there when something didn't work out, and you always were. But maybe not this time, and that's okay. I’ll be fine on the other side. It’s just a mirror. All we need to do is find a way out. But we’ll be fine.”

Lance doesn't care about any of that. He hears him but he’s never cared less. “We need to stick together, Keith.”

“There’s only so long we can do that.”

He’s almost fully immersed now, but Lance still can't let him go. Not after everything and when they'd just seemed to have gotten this thing figured out. Or at least knew they would get the chance to. If he lets go, he can’t know if they will ever get the chance to. 

"You have to," Keith says. "Whatever comes next, we're meant to do it alone."

Maybe that's true. Lance doesn't want it. He's never hated something more in his life. But he looks at Keith, the quiver in his lips even as he tries to be strong, his eyes, which still he can’t figure the color of. He has to let him go.

Lance closes his eyes, and he releases his grip, and he lets him go. 

He cannot hear Keith speaking on the other side. He can see him perfectly fine and that might be worse. They are both on their knees, looking at each other through the reflection, mirrors of each other but in different worlds.

Lance wonders if that’s some sort of metaphor. If they are complimentary or so the same that they have to be apart to function at all. He doesn’t know. He doesn't want to know. 

Keith mouths something. Lance shakes his head because he doesn't understand, or he doesn't want to. Keith mouths it again.

_ See you on the other side. _

He can only nod. They press their hands together across worlds. And then, as if this can't be any worse, the mirror between them begins to blur and fade, replaced with nothing but the empty space in front of him. He keeps his hand there until all he can see is Keith's palm, and then just the tips of his fingers, and then nothing. 

He is alone.

 

 

 

He walks. There’s nothing else to do. He’s sick and tired of this place and it’s fucking games, and he says so, aloud and to nothing, and nothing responds.

“Fuck,” he says. “FUCK!” His hand stings where he punches the nearest tree, startling the creatures that are settled in its branches, and he curses again, squeezing his eyes shut to stop the tears from leaking.

“I’ve gotten this far,” he says to nothing, voice like he is about to sob. “I don’t what the fuck else you want from me.”

He hears someone laugh and turns so fast towards the sound he’s afraid he’s given himself whiplash. The creatures hidden in the trees fly away like a disturbed flock of birds, leaving him the only breathing thing. 

“Who’s there?”

They laugh again, and it echoes across the expanse. Lance repeats the question. He turns toward the sound of the answering laughter and startles.

“Hunk,” he says and then blinks. Suddenly the person before him is Pidge, morphed in the second he took to blink. She tilts her head, eyes glinting behind her glasses, and smiling like she knows something he doesn’t. Which she usually does. But this is different. 

“Hello,” she says in greeting. Simple enough. Lance can work with hello.

“Hi,” Lance says in return.

“What are you doing here?” She asks. Always so curious.

“I could ask you the same question.”

Pidge hums in feigned agreement. “That’s for you to decide, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it is, actually,” Lance admits, and then watches as Pidge grows taller in front of him, her skin melting like wax and her features reshaping into an uncanny resemblance of Allura.

“You’ve gotten this far,” Allura says. “But what progress have you truly made?”

“What?” Lance asks. He doesn’t understand.

Allura smiles. Lance has never seen her smile like that. It would not be odd, he thinks, for there to be blood staining her teeth and lips, with the way she smiles. The hairs on his arms raise in warning. The leaves around him rustle. 

“Still the same old Lance,” she says. “Vulnerable, naive, stupid.” 

“Allura,” Lance says, as though that will do anything to stop her from going on.

“You have always been the weak link. Didn’t you know? I wondered when you would finally come to realize this, but you never did. How frustrating it was for the rest of us.”

“I did realize,” Lance says. His cheeks burn. He realizes he is crying. Already. This is happening too fast. He’s giving in too fast. This just proves her point, he thinks. Weak. Stupid. Crybaby. 

Allura smiles but its not her mouth. It’s Shiro’s. She blinks and her eyes are Shiro’s. Lance can’t look away as she melts into Shiro, but it doesn’t matter. They’re all the same, he knows. They all think the same thing. He’s known it since the beginning.

“I never realized how much energy it took to put up with you until you were gone,” Shiro says. “You’re fucking exhausting.”

“I’m sorry,” Lance says.  

“What good does that do?” Hunk says, because Shiro has become Hunk. “Sorry this. Sorry that. Sorry does nothing. You know what would?”

“I don’t know.” Except he does. He’s known for forever, and he should have done it a long time ago. He thought about it. He just couldn’t ever bring himself to go through with it. But he should have gone through with it. 

“If you left,” Pidge says. Her voice is all of them at once, a distorted and terrifying sound.

“No,” he says, even now. He’s always been so stubborn. Too stubborn, his mother would say when he wouldn’t eat his vegetables and when he only applied to the Garrison because no other school would do and when his eye socket swelled to the size of a baseball because he couldn’t just run instead of let those boys hurt you this way. Next time you run, baby. You run and don’t look back. You are not a fighter.

His mother.

“Why did you leave me, Leandro?”

“Ma,” he sobs. “Ma, I’m so sorry.”

“Were we not enough for you?” His mother asks. Her eyes are the same dark brown, the shade and shape of almonds, he'd always thought. Her hair is the same frizzy, braided and so long it reaches her waist and gives her a headache after showers but she still refused to cut it. Her hands are the same. Her voice is the same. Everything is the same, so it must truly be her. Of course, she found a way to him across all that distance. Across the universe and even across dreams. 

“Why haven’t you come back home?" She says. "My beautiful boy, my light. I miss you so much. Come back to me.”

“Mom, I can’t,” Lance says. The impact of his knees to the floor will leave bruises later, he knows. “I can’t yet. I’m so sorry. But I need to keep you safe. You and Dad, and Veronica and Marco and Luis, and everyone. I need to keep Earth safe. The only way for me to do that is up here, fighting.”

“Why you? Why not someone else. You are not a fighter, Leandro. You were never a fighter.”

“I am now, Ma.” 

She looks at him. Lost. In her eyes he is unrecognizable, and that breaks his heart more than anything. He reaches up and holds her hand in his, and kisses it like he used to. Each morning before he would leave for school, and when she was cooking in the kitchen and he'd be overwhelmed by his love for her, and when she would come into his room to sit at the edge of his bed, to tell him she missed him. 

“I’m right here,” he had said to her. And she’d smiled. He’d been struck by how old she’d gotten at that moment, all while he wasn't even looking. She looked so sad. The wrinkles around here eyes so much deeper.

“I know you are. But these says you feel so much further away. You are growing into a beautiful man, mijo. There is so much love inside you. I am so afraid the world will hurt you because of how much love there is inside of you.”

“Ma,” he had said, had taken her hand and placed it in his lap. “You don’t have to worry so much about me.”

“I know. You are so much stronger than you even know. I just can’t help it. You are my beautiful son.”

“I love you,” he had said, and kissed her hand. Just like he does now.

“Never as much as I love you,” his mother says, just like she had then.

And she crumbles in front of him. But it’s not her, Lance knows now. His real mother was waiting for him on Earth. And he would get back to her. No matter what, he would go back to her.

His chest heaves. He stares at the empty space where she had just been and rises to his feet, turns around and begins to walk again. It must be over. This has to be over. That was all he needed to do, and he had done it. 

“Did you think that was it?” Someone says from behind him. He stops mid-foot and turns slowly towards the voice. 

His own smile stretches across his face like plastic. His black eyes glisten. A version of himself stands before him. He is a perfect replicate from head to toe. 

“Did you really think that after some measly, meaningless words, you’d be done? You’re stupider than I thought.”

“Stop,” Lance says to himself. It is him, after all, that spoke these same words so many times to himself, and that speaks them again. On the worst nights, when he begged for sleep but only to not wake in the morning. 

But he would think of his mother, and how she would grieve. He would think of his family, how they would hate him for it. 

“But they’d understand in the end,” this darker, crueler version of himself says. “Wouldn't they? After thinking about it, they would realize what an ungrateful piece of shit you were while you were alive. How obnoxious you are, how lazy and careless and repulsive. They’d understand the favor.”

“No,” Lance sobs. 

“And even though you made the decision for yourself, they are glad you were selfish enough to do it. Because now they don't have to deal with you. And they’d be better off, truly happier in the long run, you know.”

This is what he truly believed, and it’s the only reason this doppelganger knows to say these things. These words were once true for him. They had settled and stored themselves away so long ago, waiting for an excuse to revive themselves. And now they had it. 

"You've thought about how, haven't you? Don't you remember all that time fantasizing? We could jump off that cliff at the beach we went to as kids. Or we could drink ourselves to death. You know where Dad keeps the alcohol, don't you? We could swallow a thousand little pills. We could drown ourselves at sunset. It's such a lovely time of the day. The best time to die. We could pry the blades out from a razor. They'd be sharp enough, with a little muscle. What have you? What will you decide?" 

"Stop it," Lance says. 

"That's okay,” he says. “I can decide the both of us." 

And then he wraps two hands around Lance's neck, this Lance with cruel eyes and a cruel smile. He squeezes. The pressure on his windpipe gags him, cutting off the air to his lungs. He gasps for breath but finds none. He can’t speak to deny the words this Lance spits into his face.

“They are better off without us.”

He is killing himself.

But he doesn’t want to die. He never truly did. He just wanted to feel differently. He wanted to deserve life. That was all. He didn’t feel unworthy anymore. He didn't feel guilty for the way he thought, and spoke, and for the air that he breathed. Not anymore. 

“I love you, Leandro,” his mother says. He cannot see her through his fading vision, but he hears her voice beside him. She cannot pry the cruel hands from his throat-- only he could-- but her voice has that same raspy tone, and he reaches out for that, using it to anchor himself. 

“I miss you,” she says. “Come home to me.”

“You’re essential to the team,” Shiro speaks next. "We need you here with us." 

“Buddy,” Hunk says. “You’ve always had my back. Now I’ve got yours.” 

Pidge. Allura. Coran. His family and all the people he loved. They’re all there, speaking assurances into him. He feels each of their hands on his shoulder, firm and solid and comfort. He imagines each of them waiting for him and Keith to come home. 

And Keith. Keith who is the strongest person he knows. Who has lost so much and yet still. Still.

He’s here. Lance can’t see him, but he knows. He can always tell with Keith. He closes his eyes because they burn, and he sees him. His hands are cradling his face, thumbs pressing gently into his cheeks, forehead against his own. His eyes are softly closed, his lips parted like the words are perched just there, waiting.

“You are not alone.”

His lips press into Lance’s. He speaks the words into him. They make their home in his lungs and his heart, and cradle themselves in his ribcage, in his bones and his blood.

Lance opens his eyes.

“I wouldn’t,” he says. The hands around his throat squeeze tighter, but he speaks through it, voice strained but strong nonetheless. “I wouldn’t do this. Not anymore. You’re wrong. You’ve never been more wrong.”

His hands turn to dust where they had been strangling him. And he falls. He falls and falls, through the ground and further, to the very core of this dream world, where there is nothing but the blackest darkness.


	2. epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’d missed the ocean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry it's taken me so long!!!! spring semester is wack! wild! more work than i've ever had in my life! i'm more burnt out than black toast! but thanks for sticking around if u have!!! this is a tiny one but it's all i think they need
> 
> <3

He’d missed the ocean. 

Of all the planets they’d seen and searched, none had an ocean with the sort of striking vastness of Earth’s. When the moon shone onto the surface and it’s light rippled with the water. 

He dreamt about it often, and about his toes wiggling beneath the clear water, waiting to warm so he could take one step further into it. He dreamt about sand and bonfires, and about the little crabs he’d pick out from underneath the rocks, laughing at the way their crawling tickled on his suntanned skin. 

It’s no wonder this dream has brought him here, in the end. Lance is surprised it hadn’t sooner. But he was grateful for that, too. This ocean was a place for endings, beautiful but painful, and a reminder that they weren’t quite home yet. There were still a few more steps to take. A little more space to bridge towards home. 

It’s cold but he barely feels it, and the time of day just after sunset, when the sky is darkening but isn’t quite night yet, a pallet of swirling purples and reds. The sand is white like pearls, and the water bluer than he's ever seen it. This was always his favorite time to walk the coastline. His eyes burn and there is a knot in his throat, but it’s not like before. It hurts but in a longing way. 

“Lance.” 

He turns towards that voice. Relief rises in his chest, a well of warmth like a rising wave. This one won't crash down though. The feeling will stay. 

Keith is right beside him. The wind whips around him, making a mess of dark hair that he struggles to hold back. Lance laughs a little at the sight. Keith smiles and surrenders to the wind. 

“You made it,” Lance says to him. He wants to say more, but there's so much time for that now. So he keeps it simple. 

“So did you,” Keith says. 

“What did they give you?” 

Keith’s eyes flash with pain for a moment, but it quickly dissipates and he shakes his head, stepping closer to Lance and wrapping his arms around him, his head rested softly on Lance’s shoulder. Lance thinks he might be crying, but when he speaks it’s strong and clear. 

“One day soon I’ll tell you. When we’re finally awake.” 

“Okay,” Lance says into his shoulder, and squeezes him tightly, the only real thing he's known for who knows how long it's been. “I’m sorry.” 

Keith gently pulls away, looks at Lance in this way that makes his chest swell. 

“I’m sorry, too.” 

“Are you ready?” Lance asks. He grabs Keith’s hand in his own. 

“I’m ready.” 

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s go home.” 

Keith smiles, cheeky but soft all the same, and kisses Lance once on the cheek, pauses one moment and then kisses him firmly on the mouth. He does not pull away, his lips brushing Lance’s when he says, “I already am.” 

They turn towards the sea. The waves crash violently but welcoming, ready to embrace them. Lance hears what they are saying. He knows exactly what they want. 

Together they step into the sea. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> END! thanks so much for reading! leave a lil comment if you can (they help me with writing motivation so i'd love u) or not whatever works for you! 
> 
> xoxo gossip squirrel

**Author's Note:**

> the E N D 
> 
> lmao just kidding there will be an epilogue! i just haven't written it yet but i will b doing this soon. thanks for reading, as always! ilymuchomucho
> 
> my original concepts for this story were quite a bit darker than what we ended up with but i scrapped most of it to lighten the story up a little, on account of i wanted it to be a little warmer, more accessible, and also less preachy and #fakeDeep (for example lance's vines were originally a representation of previous self harm, and would react according to his current feelings towards himself). for me they are still this; i simply decided not to elaborate on it so much, which is the case for most of this (it also makes things far more ambiguous that its lance POV). but i tried to make a lot of these sorts of things more interpretive for the reader,,; so it can be whatever u want! i also had a scene where that lump in your throat when you wanna cry crawls out of lance's throat and perches on his shoulder and starts, rather comically, berating him (also scrapped but it was funny and fun to write). anYWAY i'm talking a lot more than i typically do in the notes idk i just feel a great need to EXplaiN myself for unknown reasons!! but like,,.. hmu if u want those unreleased deets ;') 
> 
> take care of urselves and a happy belated new year 
> 
> @petalloso.tumblr.com or @pininqkeith.tumblr.com


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